"It's ideal for Headquarters, of course. My father put every security measure known to wizardkind on it when he lived here. It's unplottable, so Muggles could never come and call - as if they'd ever have wanted to - and now Dumbledore's added his protection, you'd be hard put to find a safer house anywhere."

Although Sirius Black stated that the house was unoccupied after the death of his mother Walburga in 1985, the Black family tree shows that both of Sirius's grandfathers, Arcturus Black III and Pollux Black, were in fact alive until at least 1990, as was his great-aunt Cassiopeia and Callidora Longbottom. It is unclear why none of them would have lived in the house, given that it was the ancestral home of the Black family.

Under Sirius Black

Sirius Black and Harry Potter in front of the Black family tree tapestry in the drawing room.

Sirius Black, Walburga's son, hated number 12 Grimmauld Place, and left when he was sixteen. He never imagined he would have to return to his family's home.[1] During Sirius's imprisonment in Azkaban, wrongly convicted for the crime of murdering several Muggles (Peter Pettigrew being the real perpetrator), the house was unoccupied. After his escape in 1993,[2] Sirius gave the home over to the Order of the Phoenix to be used as a headquarters. The home required an arduous cleaning up to make it even remotely habitable. Much of this work fell to Molly Weasley and her children. The home was in such disrepair that doxies and boggarts had made themselves quite at home.[1]

Some point before his death, Sirius wrote in his will that Harry was to inherit the house after his death by using the magical equivalent of the English Common Law concept of the Entailed Estate. Under this type of arrangement, the inheritance of the covered property by the designated heir ("down the direct line, to the next male with the name of 'Black'") cannot be prevented by disinheritance or any other legal means. The only way the entail breaks is if there is no living descendant who matches the conditions of the entail. When the entail breaks, the property in question can be disposed of by any legal means, including being willed to any person the current holder so chooses. This legal mechanism matches the known circumstances of the inheritance, where the property was inherited by Sirius despite the fact that he was "disowned", and then could be successfully left to Harry Potter once there was no "direct line, male descendant."

Under Harry Potter

The Secret-Keepers included Severus Snape, who had killed Dumbledore[3] and was believed to be in Lord Voldemort's employ and therefore would allow Death Eaters into the Order's headquarters. Alastor Moody placed a number of enchantments on the house to keep Snape from entering.

A dust-formed Albus Dumbledore defence set up by Alastor Moody.

These were a Tongue-Tying Curse to prevent him from telling others of the place and a dust-composed form of Dumbledore, which disintegrated when the person it advanced upon said the word kill or a variant, the point of this being that Moody believed that Snape would be too overrun with guilt to say that he had killed Albus, forcing him to retreat. However, the Order did not know that Albus Dumbledore's death was prearranged with Severus Snape. Despite these enchantments, the Order ceased use of the house as headquarters as they still could not risk being ambushed by Death Eaters.[4]

Kreacher returned days later with Mundungus, who revealed that the locket was taken by Dolores Umbridge in Diagon Alley. The trio hatched a plan to infiltrate the Ministry of Magic. While performing four weeks of stakeouts at the Ministry entrance, they spent some of their free time cleaning up 12 Grimmauld Place.[4]

After retrieving Salazar Slytherin's Locket from Umbridge, they Apparated back to Grimmauld Place, but Yaxley grabbed Hermione's arm in the process. She struck him with a Revulsion Jinx and Disapparated away with Harry and Ron, but the house's location had been revealed to Yaxley, and they were forced to abandon it.[4]

It is unknown if Harry came to live in the house with his family or left it abandoned.

Layout

Ground floor

Molly Weasley and Harry Potter at the bottom of the stairwell.

The front door opened into a long hallway, lit by a large chandelier and gas lamps. By 1995, its wallpaper was peeling and the carpet had been worn thin. Walburga Black's portrait hung in this hallway. There was also a troll-leg umbrella stand, which, on numerous occasions, Nymphadora Tonks tripped up over, usually causing the portrait of Walburga Black to awaken and start screaming.[5]

On one side of the hallway was the dining room, which featured a dresser holding the Black family crest and china. It became filled with spiders when the house was abandoned. At the end of the hallway were the stairs to the upper floors, decorated with a row of shrunken House-elf heads, mounted on the wall on plaques.[6]

Kitchen

The kitchen

The kitchen was below the ground floor and accessed through a narrow staircase at the end of the entry hallway. The kitchen was a cavernous room with a large fireplace at one end and a large wooden table in the centre.[7] There was also a large pantry and a small room used by Kreacher as a bedroom.

First floor

House-elves

The wall of the staircase leading to the first upper floor was decorated with the heads of house-elves mounted on plaques. On the first landing, there were at least three rooms: a drawing room, a bedroom once shared by Hermione Granger and Ginny Weasley,[6] and a bathroom. The drawing room had long windows facing the street in front of the house, a large fireplace, and the tapestry of the Black family tree.

Upper floors

The second floor featured at least one bedroom, which was shared by Harry Potter and Ron Weasley in the summer of 1995. It featured a portrait of Phineas Nigellus Black until Hermione removed it to take on her, Harry, and Ron's journey.[8]

The living room.

It is unknown what is on the third floor, but it is likely filled with bedrooms, given that Arthur, Molly, and Fred and George all slept a floor above Harry and Ron in 1995, and the topmost landing features only two bedrooms. These were the bedrooms of Sirius and Regulus. The former was decorated with Gryffindor colours and banners and posters of bikini-clad Muggle women and muggle motorbikes, while the latter was decorated in Slytherin green, with the Black family crest over the bed and newspaper clippings about Lord Voldemort on the walls. Both were once ornate, but had decayed by the late 1990s.[9] The master bedroom where Buckbeak stayed may have been on the third floor as well.

Contents

Salazar Slytherin's Locket, once in the possession of Regulus Black.

Number 12, Grimmauld Place held many Black family heirlooms and possessions, such as a music box that played a sickly tune and tried to put the listener to sleep, crested goblets, a biting silver box containing Wartcap Powder, and an unopenable locket which turned out to be Salazar Slytherin's Locket, one of Lord Voldemort's Horcruxes. This was where Kreacher put the object after he drove himself mad not being able to complete his master's orders to destroy the locket because it had to be damaged past the point of repair, which was beyond the capabilities and understanding of the house-elf.

Another object of note was the Portrait of Walburga Black, which has an unpleasant habit of loudly screaming about the "Mudbloods" and "blood traitors" of the Order of the Phoenix members that inhabited the house, due to Walburga's prejudice against such people. The portrait was usually closed off with curtains, which aimed to keep the portrait quiet, but are not very effective; any loud noise in the vicinity would cause the curtains to fly open, and Walburga to start raging and howling again until someone forces the curtains shut.

Harry Potter searching one of the bedrooms for the locket.

Many of these family heirlooms were stolen and peddled by Mundungus Fletcher, including Salazar Slytherin's Locket, which the thief was forced to give to none other than Dolores Umbridge to avoid prosecution for trading without a licence, she used the locket to enforce her pure-blood credentials, claiming that the 'S' stood for Selwyn, which she claimed was a pure-blood family to whom she was related. In fact, the locket was an heirloom of Salazar Slytherin as well as one of Lord Voldemort's Horcruxes, which Regulus Black stole when he abandoned the Death Eaters.

Known objects

An ornate crystal bottle with a large opal set into the stopper, full of what appeared to be blood.

Boxes, made of tarnished silver and inscribed with languages Harry did not understand.

Etymology

The name is another of J. K. Rowling's puns: Grimmauld Place can be taken as "grim, old place" or "grim mould place."

Behind the scenes

The inheritance of the property by Sirius Black is almost certainly governed by the magical equivalent of the English Common Law concept of the Entailed Estate. Under this type of arrangement, the inheritance of the covered property by the designated heir ("down the direct line, to the next male with the name of 'Black'") cannot be prevented by disinheritance or any other legal means. The only way the entail breaks is if there is no living descendant who matches the conditions of the entail. When the entail breaks, the property in question can be disposed of by any legal means, including being willed to any person the current holder so chooses. This legal mechanism matches the known circumstances of the inheritance, where the property was inherited by Sirius although he was "disowned", and then could be successfully left to Harry Potter once there was no "direct line, male descendant."

In the films, Harry's inheritance of the house is omitted.

If Harry decided to live in Grimmauld Place with his family, it could said that Harry would have changed it to make it more family friendly.